Search for files and folders

Use the files.list method to search for files and folders.

Search for all files and folders on the current user's My Drive

Use the files.list without any parameters to return all files and folders.

Search for specific files or folders on the current user's My Drive

To search for a specific set of files or folders, use the query string q with files.list to filter the files to return.

This example shows the format of a query string:

query_term operator values

Where:

• query_term is the query term or field to search upon. To view the query terms that can be used to filter shared drives, refer to Search query terms.
• operator specifies the condition for the query term. To view which operators you can use with each query term, refer to Query operators.
• values are the specific values you want to use to filter your search results.

For example, the following query string filters the search to just return folders:

q: mimeType = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'

The following example shows how to use a client library to filter search results to file names and IDs of JPEG image files. This example uses the mimeType query term to narrow results to files of type image/jpeg. This example also sets spaces to drive to further narrow the search to the drive space. When nextPageToken returns null, there are no more results.

String pageToken = null;
do {
  FileList result = driveService.files().list()
      .setQ("mimeType='image/jpeg'")
      .setSpaces("drive")
      .setFields("nextPageToken, items(id, title)")
      .setPageToken(pageToken)
      .execute();
  for (File file : result.getItems()) {
    System.out.printf("Found file: %s (%s)\n",
        file.getTitle(), file.getId());
  }
  pageToken = result.getNextPageToken();
} while (pageToken != null);

page_token = None
while True:
    response = drive_service.files().list(q="mimeType='image/jpeg'",
                                          spaces='drive',
                                          fields='nextPageToken, items(id, title)',
                                          pageToken=page_token).execute()
    for file in response.get('items', []):
        # Process change
        print 'Found file: %s (%s)' % (file.get('title'), file.get('id'))
    page_token = response.get('nextPageToken', None)
    if page_token is None:
        break

var pageToken = null;
// Using the npm module 'async'
async.doWhilst(function (callback) {
  drive.files.list({
    q: "mimeType='image/jpeg'",
    fields: 'nextPageToken, items(id, title)',
    spaces: 'drive',
    pageToken: pageToken
  }, function (err, res) {
    if (err) {
      // Handle error
      console.error(err);
      callback(err)
    } else {
      res.items.forEach(function (file) {
        console.log('Found file:', file.title, file.id);
      });
      pageToken = res.nextPageToken;
      callback();
    }
  });
}, function () {
  return !!pageToken;
}, function (err) {
  if (err) {
    // Handle error
    console.error(err);
  } else {
    // All pages fetched
  }
})

To restrict the search to folders, use the query string to set the MIME type to q: mimeType = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'

Query string examples

This table shows some basic query strings. The actual code differs depending on the client library you use for your search.

Search the corpora

Searches that call files.list use the default corpus by default. To search other corpora, such as files shared to a Google Workspace domain, use the corpora parameter.

Multiple corpora may be searched in a single query, though incomplete results may be returned if the combined corpus is too large. If incompleteSearch result is true, not all documents have been returned.